There in the wine cellar, Will kissed her neck as he tore off her sweater, and she arched her back against the surprisingly cold floor. He pushed her skirt up around her waist. And then they breathed into each other, their mouths tasting like wine. “Oh my God,” Will kept saying, every so often pausing to stare at her. Tears formed in Corinne’s eyes, though she wasn’t sad. It was just that she remembered Will doing that same thing the first time they were together. Looking at her like that, as if he couldn’t believe this was happening.
That first night, the boat had bobbed with their movements. Their sounds echoed across the bay. Corinne had never felt particularly passionate about sex, but with Will above her, blanketed by a canopy of stars, something happened. Something that felt very different. An aligning of the planets, maybe. A big bang, creating a universe.
And that was the thing. They had, in fact, created something that night.
They’d created someone.
11
Rowan sat at her desk at seven on Wednesday evening, staring blearily at a contract on her screen. It was still light outside, the evening hours stretching longer and longer as they moved further into May. A few phones rang in the bullpen of cubicles outside her office. Every so often, a paralegal or assistant swept by, but most people were packing up to leave.
She looked at her screen again, about to pull up a different document. But then the cursor began to drift toward the bottom right-hand corner of her monitor, though she hadn’t touched the mouse. Rowan straightened up and rolled her chair back a few inches. She watched as the little arrow slowly migrated to the Windows icon in the bottom-left corner.
“Hello?” she called out, though to whom she wasn’t sure. How had that happened?
There was a cough in the hall, then a small, shuffling set of footsteps. “H-hello?” Rowan called out, half standing. The office was suddenly too quiet, too empty. “Is someone there?”
Rowan jumped as Danielle Gilchrist poked her head in, her face flashing with worry. “Oh my God, I didn’t mean to scare you.”
Rowan smoothed down her hair. “I’m fine. What’s up?” She offered a wobbly smile, taking in Danielle’s long red hair and her modern-looking black-and-pink wool dress. She and Danielle worked together from time to time—as legal counsel, Rowan occasionally had to advise on hires and fires.
Danielle checked over her shoulder, then stepped into the room and shut the door. “Something has kind of been weighing on my mind.”
“Sit,” Rowan said, gesturing to the couch across from her desk.
Danielle perched on a cushion and folded her hands in her lap, a conflicted look on her face. A few moments passed before she spoke. “I’ve been thinking a lot about Poppy’s murder and who might want to hurt her . . . and I had a thought. Something I’m not sure the FBI knows about.”
A shock wave coursed through Rowan. “What do you mean?”
Danielle took a deep breath. “I used to be friends with Poppy’s assistant, Shoshanna. You remember her, right? She basically ran Poppy’s life? She was my hire. She came highly recommended.”
“Sure,” Rowan said. Plenty of times she’d walked into Poppy’s office when Shoshanna, a lanky girl with curly black hair, a long face, and a predilection for baby-doll dresses, was briefing Poppy about something or other. “She left the company a few months ago, right? For De Beers?”
“That’s right. She got a great offer in the PR department, better than what we could match.” Danielle cleared her throat. “Before she left, though, she sort of let something slip about Poppy.”
Out the window, a searchlight beamed around the sky. Rowan stared for a moment, then glanced back at her computer screen. The cursor hadn’t moved again. “What did Shoshanna say?” she asked, turning back to Danielle.
“Maybe it’s nothing, but she mentioned some . . . discrepancies in Poppy’s schedule. Poppy started putting mysterious appointments in her calendar—vague things, like ‘meeting,’ without saying who it was with. And when Shoshanna asked—it was her job to know—Poppy said that she had everything covered. Shoshanna said she got kind of snippy about it.”
“Okay,” Rowan said, tapping the surface of her desk. None of that sounded so strange to her.
Danielle pulled her bottom lip into her mouth. “Or she would write things like ‘lunch with James,’ but then James would call during lunch, not knowing anything about a lunch. Shoshanna had to cover for her.”
Rowan sat back. That was strange. But Poppy could have had the date wrong, or James might have forgotten. There were lots of explanations. “Huh.”
“Shoshanna said she started taking these mysterious blocked calls too. And one time, Shoshanna tried to hop on the phone to take notes for Poppy and Poppy snapped at her to get off. She didn’t explain who the calls were from or what they were about. But I think Shoshanna drew some conclusions.” Danielle stuck her tongue in her cheek.
Rowan searched her face. The only sounds in the office were the little buzzes and clicks of Rowan’s hard drive. Her brain seemed to temporarily short out, going black. Finally she said, “You think Poppy was having an affair?”